Chief of staff RON KLAIN hasn’t said he’s planning to leave the White House any time soon but current and former Biden administration officials are already openly speculating about his successor.

In conversations with over a dozen such officials over the past few months, one name is always at the top of the list: JEFF ZIENTS, the White House Covid-⁠19 response coordinator. The only debate is if he’s the frontrunner to be the next chief of staff or just a frontrunner…

But Zients, who runs the Covid team and makes nearly every major decision about the direction of the pandemic response, has emerged largely unscathed. He has yet to be called to testify before Congress about the Covid response. And unlike Walensky and Dr. ANTHONY FAUCI, he has made only a handful of television appearances. He doesn’t have a public Twitter account either, mirroring the approach of many in Biden’s inner circle. The result: he is, effectively, invisible to much of the public even as he wields immense power over Biden’s top priority.

“Everything that gets to the president gets filtered through Zients,” one person familiar with the matter said of the Covid response decision-making process. Asked in a Senate hearing last month who is the “head coach” of the Covid-19 response, Fauci pointed to Zients.